Soul Searching

‘My Faith Is My Identity’

Jon Elkin ’08

The son of two Jewish educators, one of them a rabbi, Jon Elkin ’08 attended Jewish schools from preschool through high school and, for eight summers starting in the fifth grade, attended monthlong Jewish camps.

“I was always surrounded by Jewish kids, learning Jewish things,” he says.

In ninth grade, his appreciation grew for the Sabbath—particularly its commitment to rest and time with family—as an escape from demanding teachers and harried sports schedules. He even looked forward to going to bed early on Friday nights.

Elkin remained steadfast in his beliefs once he got to college, despite being surrounded for the first time by classmates who didn’t practice Judaism or understand its history. He observed the Sabbath while friends from other religions went out on the weekends; the temptations to drive, use a computer for homework, and spend money during that time, in the beginning and for the next three years, were relatively easy to ignore.

But Elkin acknowledges that his senior year, religiously speaking, has been his experimental phase. “I’m getting to it pretty late,” he jokes. While he still prays and attends Hillel services regularly, he routinely makes concessions during the Sabbath and questions other aspects of his faith.

“It feels weird because I still consider myself an observing Jew, but some of the things I do aren’t consistent with that,” he says. “There are times I forget whether it’s Saturday or Sunday. The first time that happened, it was almost a scary moment. I definitely sometimes step back and think, ‘Are you making too many concessions? Are you going to be able to return to this lifestyle if you want to down the road?’”

Even as Elkin found it increasingly difficult to navigate certain tenets of the Jewish faith, his upbringing in the Conservative tradition of Judaism served him well while studying abroad in Nairobi, Kenya, in spring 2007. He would walk into a synagogue and instantly feel at home in a foreign land, saying the same prayers and reading the same parts of the Torah that he would have on those same days back in the United States.

The challenge for Elkin this past year has been how to reconcile what he’s supposed to be doing with what he feels right doing—especially when the two conflict.

But one thing hasn’t changed, and that’s his lifelong commitment to Judaism.

“I consider myself a Jew before anything else,” he says. “I see myself as responsible for the continuation of the religion, to an extent, and I want to have a Jewish family and home when I get older. But I’ve also begun to see myself as more of a global citizen. In college I’ve been exposed to more ideas, cultures, ethnicities than ever before, so that got me interested in different kinds of things.

“It has sparked some debate in my family about where our obligations lie,” he adds. “I definitely have been pushed and pulled a little bit more to see myself in a broader context. . . . But my faith is still my identity, for sure.”